The present invention relates to an unique seafood product similar to abalone, and to a method for making that product from comminuted fish meat and shellfish.
The process of mechanically deboning of fish meat has received increasing attention during the last twenty years throughout the world in order to utilize efficiently nutritious proteinaceous resources, such as numerous underutilized marine species. Many efforts have been made recently to produce more expensive, more attractive, more acceptable fabricated products for human consumption from mechanically deboned fish meat. Simulated meat products of crab, shrimp and scallop have been marketed with great success during recent years.
Abalone is well known for its delicate flavor and distinctive texture. The availability of abalone has decreased rapidly in recent years and become an increasingly rare and expensive product, in both restaurants and markets. No satisfactory way was known to provide a method for making an artificial seafood product resembling relatively rare and expensive seafood products such as abalone from inexpensive and underutilized marine species.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,532,512 discloses a simulated seafood product, the attempt being to simulate abalone. In the disclosed method, two portions of raw scallops, one of which is ground and the other of which is shredded into its natural muscle fibers, are mixed and combined with a quantity of animal gelatin and flattened to uniform thickness. The restructured product made by the disclosed process simulates abalone in appearance and flavor, but its texture is quite different from natural abalone meat; the texture is undesirably soft and mushy, and the product lacks distinctive bite characteristics of abalone meat. In addition, scallop has become too expensive for use as feed stock.
Many Japanese Kamaboko manufacturers have tried to make imitation abalone product from deboned fish meat for many years, particularly by using their technology for enhancing the elasticity of Kamaboko. Such technology utilizes a setting method in which ground fish meat, with salt, is set to elastic jelly condition. Application of the setting method is very effective to increase elasticity and cohesiveness of Kamaboko products, but from the standpoint of making imitation abalone, the resulting products are so tough and rubbery that the texture is quite different from that of natural cooked abalone.